September 26, 2017

I have yet to read or hear news coverage of yesterday's repeal-and-replace collapse that omitted similar wording to the NY Times'. Sen. Susan Collins' defection — she called the latest bill "deeply flawed," a euphemism for "stupendously cruel" — "virtually ensur[ed] that Republicans would not have the votes they need for passage," reports the Times. What's "virtual" or uncertain about at least three hard votes against it?

Shockingly, it was Donald Trump who assessed his party's legislative predicament without spin or equivocation. Calling in on the "Rick & Bubba" radio show, he said "We’re going to lose two or three votes, and that’s the end of that." I'm a bit unclear on why he used the pronoun "we," since, unshockingly, he blamed the entire fiasco on his party. The only certainty in the Trump administration is that when failure lands with a manifest thud, the president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party will assure his base that he had nothing to do with it. Turns out, the demagogue who promised to single-handedly "fix" pretty much all of America's carnage is just a bystander (except to add to it).

But though Trump's gloomy remark that "that's the end of that" lacked equivocation, was it accurate? Not necessarily. In one of the funniest comments I've ever heard come from a Republican pol, Sen. Orrin Hatch mused that "We're supposed to be able to handle complications." Note the conditional verb usage. Still, in modern GOP jargon, "handling complications" only means further manipulating the Senate's rules.

As Politico reports, "Some Republican senators have suggested starting over, with parliamentary language in a new budget blueprint that once again would shield repeal legislation from a filibuster…. Republicans could provide reconciliation instructions for both health care and tax reform" (my emphasis). "That might entail some procedural hurdles, but one GOP aide said Monday that because the Finance Committee has jurisdiction over about 95 percent of health care policy, 'it’s not like we couldn’t slip it in anyway.'"

Yet what are procedural hurdles and extended hypocrisy about what Republicans repeatedly denounced as the legislative scourge of Democrats' health-care reconciliation maneuver? Even those complications are but trivial pursuits when compared to the straightforward simplicity of Republicans' far deeper and far more cynical objective in prolonging the reconciliation option.

Adds Politico, Doing so would put the contentious issue of health care back in the spotlight during the 2018 midterm elections.

Here is a base-pandering bone from which Republican curs just can't let go. The policy of Obamacare is, to the GOP, of much lesser importance than the politics of it. For decades, from the Reagan through the Bush II administrations, they dangled all manner of cultural wedges — such as the abolition of a woman's right to choose — before their socially conservative base. But achieving their cultural reactionaryism would have cooked some their finest, raw electoral meat. And God knows they couldn't have that; the politics of demagogic cynicism demanded that such issues always be kept fresh — and readily available for cheap pandering.

For what genuine, realistic policy ideas do Republicans actually have to sell?

September 25, 2017

"The next big item on the G.O.P. agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy may be an easier political lift than taking health insurance away from 30 million Americans. But Republicans still have a problem, because they’ve spent years posing as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they have no idea how to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit."

Of course they don't, because exploding government's income without lighting a deficit fuse is empirically, mathematically impossible. But when has the party's masking of radical fiscal recklessness with its traditional claims of conservative fiscal responsibility ever inhibited them? While Trump boasts about a soaring GDP, they'll bellow contradictorily about the need for tax cuts to "get the economy moving again" — and they'll do it with accompanying, stentorian fallaciousness about tax cuts paying for themselves, their tireless, Reaganesque Laffer scam.

Krugman adds that "the bill for cynicism seems to be coming due. For years, flat-out lies about policy served Republicans well, helping them win back control of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But those same lies now leave them unable to govern." While that is demonstrably true, Republican pols have also validated the most egregious menace to a healthy representative democracy. They have learned they can lie with extensive impunity; that democratic accountability, especially on tax policy, has steadily gone the way of the Studebaker.

Nonetheless, a fundamental shift in Republican politics has taken place — it has tied itself to Donald Trump. Now vastly unpopular, deeply distrusted and intellectually vapid, he is the face of the Republican Party, no matter how often he denounces his partisan colleagues. The GOP has been a cynical fraud for decades, yet its fraudulence has been plastered over by superior public relations, from the smiling, furtive visage of Ronald Reagan to the phony, down-home "toughness" of George W. Bush. Trump evinces nothing but incompetence and a transparent willingness to lie about everything — consequently, he is taking the party down.

Undoubtedly it will proceed will all its usual folderol about massive tax cuts and magical deficit-avoidance. But now its lies will be burdened by its chief spokesman. "[T]ax policy, like health care," observes Krugman, "will be hobbled by a legacy of lies." If hobbled it is, this time around the hobbling will be afflicted by Trumpian lies — which, paradoxically, are having the pleasant effect of restoring some level of democratic accountability.

Do I agree with Krugman's rather strong implication and now believe that Republican lies about yet more tax cuts will fatally hobble their passage? No. Blowing up deficits is what modern "conservatives" do, and they do it with remarkable unity. But daily this president further devastates his party's political credibility, and his unpresidential squalor will, in time, ineluctably doom the GOP on all manner of policy.

September 24, 2017

To many of Trump's supporters, football is their religion and the NFL is their church. And so I would think his assault on a sport "struggling to make the game safer in light of scores of players who have been found to have severe brain damage" — oh, the irony — might have been his first, racist miscalculation. Defending white supremacists and neo-Nazis is one thing; criticizing the liturgy of football, so many of whose honored deacons are black, is quite another.

But of course my conjecture is probably misplaced. The sports site Deadspin wrote that Trump's attack on the NFL's new safety rules "demonstrated an already-evident dearth of intellect," which is also the chief characteristic of most Trump supporters. Their tolerance of presidential ignorance and its assorted corollaries appears to be infinite — so here, too, they are more likely cheering than grimacing. "[M]any fans on social media were supportive of the president" in his oddly calculated ignorance, reports the NY Times. Still, the question is out there: What percentage is "many"?

Deadspin added this to the irony of a severely brain-damaged president denouncing at least some protections against severe brain damage among the NFL's players: "[Quarterback Colin] Kaepernick is off the field due mainly if not entirely to his silent protests against police brutality" — protests which Trump, in his own infinite ignorance, has chosen to describe as disrespect for flag and country. But, as Kaepernick's mother remarked, "[It's] what most of us have come to expect from him."

What Trump's indignation against decency was really about, though, was something even more expected by now than his decades-old racism. It followed yet another presidential failure — that of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Trump's first year in office is indeed historic, as he often brags, but for a reason he must increasingly try to conceal. He has managed to transmogrify a monumental election upset into the most immense, in-office flop in American presidential history. The self-professed artful dealmaker has accomplished precisely nothing. Thus on the heels of each presidential failure he lets loose some colossally idiotic comment that is bound to swamp the headlines and airwaves.

Can he successfully sustain these transparent distractions until he's impeached, indicted, or resigns from the threat of either? Sustain them he can, no doubt, but I do harbor doubt about their successful deployments having any real effect on their staving off his ultimate destruction. Because Robert Mueller isn't distracted.

September 23, 2017

We're going to win so much, you're going to get tired of winning, You’re going to say: "Please, Mr. President, I have a headache. Please, don't win so much. This is getting terrible." And I'm going to say, "No, we have to make America great again." You're gonna say, "Please." I said: "Nope, nope. We're gonna keep winning."

—Candidate Donald Trump, February 2016, in what would now be a speech that could have been delivered by Joseph Goebbels during the Stalingrad offensive

Trump has never been a true winner. But when it comes to spectacular scamming, he's always been the real article. In fact, none truer. And he continued his latest con last night at a Strange rally. "Maybe we’re going to do it now — it’s a little tougher without McCain’s vote, I’ll be honest," he said, using "little" as an honest substitute for "Himalayan."

According to a NY Times piece, Trump's party executed its latest attempt at repeal and replace largely in a bid to simply appease donors. To Republicans the devastation of a sixth of the economy and the stripping of health care from millions are mere hiccups when compared to the splendid sighs that come from raking in the boodle. Sen. Cory Gardner, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, unveiled the bleak news last week at a closed party session.

"Gardner of Colorado painted a dire picture for his colleagues. Campaign fund-raising was drying up, he said, because of widespread disappointment among donors over the inability of the Republican Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act or do much of anything else…. 'Donors are furious,' one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. 'We haven’t kept our promise.'"

Sen. Pat Roberts, in a Grassley-like remark about his party's singular objective of raw power over thoughtful governance, said "If we do nothing, it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections, and whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel." The massively traumatic consequences to the republic of doing worse than "nothing" would be at most a minor annoyance to a party wholly consumed by winning by any means — Trumpian Sociopathy 101.

I suspect, however, the boodle may yet flow into Republican coffers. Next up on their agenda are tax cuts, and their donors possess a kind of Christian forgiveness as long as they're lavished with more pelf. And Trump? His task will be what he excels at: scamming the base. He'll bamboozle them with more flapdoddle about the mother lode of plutocratic tax cuts actually going to the little guy.

Now that's the sort of thing the party can rally around, and always wins at — no matter how much of a terrible headache it inflicts on the nation's fiscal stability.

September 22, 2017

The theorem stating that truth wields a leftward bias may once have been intended, in part, as an ideological offensive. Its linguistic currency was most commonplace during the Bush II administration, whose most tragic lies were grounded in its defense of the Iraq war — lies vigorously exposed by the left. But even Bushian neoconservatism had its occasional merits (even if used as a cynical cover for witless interventionism), such as advocacy of human rights — a time-honored American value which the present administration has almost just as tragically jettisoned. If absolute truth exists, it's an elusive creature.

By now, though, any leftward ideological premise once possibly underlying the theorem is no more. ContraMerriam-Webster and pink-hued activists, truth can now be properly defined as any articulation opposed to any statement, any position, any policy uttered by the Republican Party. Virtually everyone estranged from its steaming cauldron of rancid fallaciousness can, with sublime legitimacy, be called a divine advocate and noble guardian of truth, in all its reasonable variations.

By way of proving my modified theorem, simply note that even Republican pols accept it. They no longer make any serious effort to gainsay accusations of their conspicuous lies. Baghdad Bob Trump issues outrageous falsehoods by the oil-tanker load — a pathology that happened to render him president of the United States. His party has taken note of his political success via monstrous prevarications, and so — not unreasonably — his party has adopted his method in toto. Success breeds imitators.

Currently the chief practitioners of the Trumpian methodology are Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy. About their repeal-and-replace atrocity, they lie with grinning indifference. The Graham-Cassidy bill would accomplish every health-care detriment they insist it won't, but they just don't care. As Paul Krugman observes of this "stunningly cruel" and "incompetently drafted" legislation, Graham and Cassidy "have produced something that everyone, and I mean everyone, who knows anything about health care warns would cause chaos." OK. In the fetid swamp of Republican so-whatism?, knowledgeable objections, however, are blithely dismissed.

It is said by many that we live in an era of inescapable post-Truth (mere "truthiness" is so old school), courtesy of the right's unremitting propaganda machine and Donald Trump's brave new hellhole of flourishing mendacity. I, however, would counter that we've entered a clarifying world of easily verifiable Truth: Simply put, whatever belches from the malign oracle of modern Republicanism, it's a lie. And over this ruinous Republican turn, Truth increasingly will become the more common currency of American politics — and ultimately triumphant.

September 21, 2017

"I could maybe give you 10 reasons why this bill shouldn’t be considered," said the GOP senator to Iowa reporters yesterday. "But Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign. That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill."

I have always thought of Grassley as possessing maybe one or two IQ points more than his almost clinically imbecilic Republican colleague James Inhofe. Perhaps I should reassess. I doubt Inhofe's muddled mass of synaptic disconnects could come up with even one reason "why this bill shouldn't be considered."

That Grassley, however, would assert that Republicans must vote "yes" on even a catastrophic bill only to appease an unenlightened base is a startling admission of Raw Politics über Alles. That Grassley is not embarrassed by this is merely one indication of just how unenlightened the base is.

Because ...

The Unites States is a republic — not a democracy — and in sustainable republics politicians use their own (and presumably better informed) judgment, even if it sometimes conflicts with those who put them in office. Shouldn't a United States senator grasp this?

Every time I see a poll showing Trump retaining a roughly 40-percent job approval rating, I pull myself from the resulting acute depression by therapeutically recalling that we always have Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The NY Times reports that he has asked the White House to turn over all documents about "Trump’s most scrutinized actions since taking office," including the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey — Trump's most flagrant, on-the-public-record act of obstruction of justice — as well as the Apalachin-like meeting between the president and Russian diplomats, in which Trump bragged about having whacked a top, American law-enforcement official.

If the documents don't nail Trump, his mob associates — who would rat out their mothers to save their own hides — will. And what a clever bunch those associates are. I especially liked this passage from the Washington Post, reporting on Paul Manafort's emailed offer to peddle campaign information to a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. "The notes appear to be written in deliberately vague terms, with Manafort … never explicitly mentioning Deripaska by name. But investigators believe that key passages refer to [Oleg] Deripaska, who is referenced in some places by his initials, 'OVD.'" Now there's a cryptological brain-teaser.

Manafort is to Trump what "Sammy the Bull" Gravano was to Gotti.

Still, the question looms. Will the party that impeached Bill Clinton for lying about sex now argue that Trumpian obstruction of justice and virtual treason were but frivolous, run-of-the-mill political acts? For a party altogether void of ethics and a deontological mindset, what should be a rhetorical question is, rather, a clear, present, and dangerous potential of national betrayal.

September 20, 2017

I'd be less nauseated if I just stopped reading political news (not to mention writing about it). For years I've predicted that the maliciousness of Republican politics can't possibly become more obscene. I predicted it for eight years under the Bush II administration, for another eight under Obama's — whose every policy of supreme logic or simple decency was relentlessly opposed by the GOP — and now, for months, under the gangsterism of Trump's, an administration whose ignominy is as vast as it is truly indescribable. I have observed, throughout, that the Dantean bottom of modern Republicanism has, perhaps, at long last been attained; thus I've further predicted that its only remaining direction is up. And yet the party keeps proving me wrong, always finding a way to sink farther into its unspeakable sewer. And I keep getting sicker.

[It] takes money from states that did a good job getting residents covered under Obamacare and gives it to states that did not. It eliminates an expansion of the Medicaid program that covers millions of Americans in favor of block grants….

Plus,… insurers in the private marketplace would be allowed to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions, for example. And it would eliminate the individual mandate as other bills would have, but this time there is no replacement.

As we know, this wretched party is often more likely than not to follow through on its antiAmerican nihilism. About its passage of the Graham-Cassidy bill, however, my fear is quite low. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul and John McCain appear to be almost certainly opposed. Its failure, then, seems assured (two votes short).

Of course (just to concede my inconsistency), I have also frequently described GOP obscenities as bottomless. Perhaps, in fact, the party has not reached the bottom; indeed, it may not have one. Who the hell knows?

***

Quick update: I just scribbled the above from the hospital, where I'm back for merely a few hours in what's called "expanded care." My next surgery ((that is, my absence here) has been moved up a week because my blood levels are being inexcusably uncooperative. The nerve. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where all this is going. So should I suddenly vanish without notice, I will be back soon.

Thanks to all of you who contributed over the past few days to the continued operation of this site. Your generosity is deeply appreciated.

I thought I'd be back writing today in a somewhat normal fashion, but, unexpectedly, late yesterday I learned I must return to the hospital this morning for another session of fluid pumping. (By now, an old story: dehydration). Fill 'er up! Further, Wednesday I'm booked for a rendezvous with radiology. In short, it shall be Thursday before I'm back in something akin to regular order. (That promise, though, is more genuine than Paul Ryan's.) I will however try to comment here and there, between now and then.

And once again, thanks to everyone who pitched in of late. Your help is of more value than you can know.

September 18, 2017

What kind of presidential mind — what kind of adult mind — would cheerfully disseminate such an unspeakable disgrace? There is no bottom to the infantilism of Donald Trump's.

What's more, his "humorous" retweet of a physical assault on a woman — a former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate who whipped his butt by three million votes — came from an anti-Semitic Twitter user, @Fuctupmind. "Please get rid of the Hasidic Jews. They are the worst people on the planet," spewed, last November, the prolific tweeter, who is of course an enthusiastic supporter of this Fuctuppresident.

"I will be so presidential, you will be so bored," said Trump in April 2016. In a way he was right. We are somewhat bored by his endless depravity. We are also, however, horrified that here is a cretinous manchild in possession of the nuclear football.

I recall when Trump's party derided his predecessor as "unpresidential" for, on occasion, not wearing a suit jacket in the Oval Office. Now this. And yet most Republicans are silent.

That in itself is as disgraceful as Trump. Whose silence is honorable instead? "A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton," reports CNN, "declined to comment on the tweet."

September 17, 2017

Einstein's over-quoted yet still-useful theory of insanity as a commitment to selfsame failures is, once again, being tragically verified. The NY Times:

[The Trump's administration's Green Zone] expansion is part of a huge public works project that over the next two years will reshape [Afghanistan's capital city] to bring nearly all Western embassies, major government ministries, and NATO and American military headquarters within the protected area. After 16 years of American presence in Kabul, it is a stark acknowledgment that even the city’s central districts have become too difficult to defend from Taliban bombings…. Along with an increase in troops to a reported 15,000, from around 11,000 at the moment, the Trump administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.

But, continues the Times, "unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump has suggested that American forces would remain in Afghanistan until victory" — which, as our longest war's history of failure has shown, is undefinable and manifestly unachievable. For a president who campaigned on stalwart opposition to nation building and military interventions, Trump is nonetheless doubling down on the familiar insanity of both.

Which leads us to reflect on the second-longest war in America's history, whose 18-hour retelling by filmmaker Ken Burns debuts tonight on PBS. As George Will quotes the film's summation, the Vietnam war was "begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings," and "prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions" throughout multiple presidencies. Next came the Iraq war — a one-presidency misunderstanding begun in ill faith — which foolishly ignored the past. Mr. Will also quotes a bemedaled Marine veteran of our Southeast Asian catastrophe.

If by Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in (a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a clear exit strategy, (b) 'nation building' in countries about whose history and culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way of life, or 'government of, by, and for the people' are not directly threatened, then we should never get over Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an illness; it’s a vaccination.

What separates — and is most worrisome about — Trump's Afghanistan-doubling down from previous presidents' ill-considered military expansions is that this president appears to be utterly untethered from war's decision-making. That, he leaves up to the generals. He does so because he hasn't a clue about the world, about history, about diplomacy, about "clear objectives" — and certainly not about a "clear exit strategy," the absence of which he conceals by saying virtually nothing to the American people about what in God's name he's doing in Afghanistan. Indeed, what are we still doing in Afghanistan? Of its "history and culture" we remain not only "ignorant," but helpless to turn around.

So just how does Trump get away with further obscuring his hypocritical war-making and nation building? That's simple. About something else, he merely tweets something outrageous — and thereby distracts a nation still engaged its longest war.

September 16, 2017

Having written yesterday that "I now love Mr. Trump," because of his luscious betrayal of his most ardent supporters, this morning I see that a #NeverTrump conservative columnist is suddenly and equally enamored of this horror show of a venomous administration. "Uh-oh. I’m starting to enjoy Donald Trump’s presidency," confesses the NYT's Bret Stephens.

His pleasure derives from watching the "blowhards and bigots" — Laura Ingraham, Steve King, Ann Coulter, among others — "get their comeuppance at the hands of their idol." Observes Stephens: "Who are the 'cuckservatives' now? I use the epithet — 'cuck' is short for cuckold — since it’s the one [they] hurled at mainstream Republicans they accused of caving in to the moral bullying of liberals." It's all quite a "delight," he notes. He further notes, however, that "Nobody should count on it whipping any sense into those [many other] conservatives who fell for him."

Still, the war is on. Trump has, perhaps, irreparably separated himself from leading cogs of the right's malevolence machine, who themselves (again, perhaps?) are now separating themselves from their own, once-toadyish followers. To watch the GOP's fracturing is a delight indeed, and we have Donald Trump — "his addiction to betrayal" — to thank for it.

My glee is vastly tempered, though, by the prospect of any Democratic dealmaking with the devil, which was what, of course, helped to launch pseudoconservatism's latest, and probably largest, fracture. "The sudden burst of bipartisanship," remarks Politico, "could be perilous for Democrats." Their achievement of a few admirable policy goals would necessarily entail caving to Trumpian scurrility on others. Is any Faustian bargain ever worth it? Would not negotiating with this satanic sociopath not "normalize" his utter, unprecedented degradation of the American politics?

We confront these questions of ethereal ethics while also running up against the practical potential of immense political fallout. "Giving Trump the sheen of bipartisanship risks boosting his standing and potentially undermining Democrats' efforts to win back Congress," continues Politico, "not to mention the White House in 2020." In brief, whatever commendable policy goals Democrats might attain, Trump would get the credit — which would likely and perhaps permanently perpetuate his banana-republic politics. Absolutely anything goes would be proven permissible, and Trumpian imitators would insidiously flood the American political scene.

Hence I find myself in a most wretched fog of war. To now adore Trump for his delightful betrayal of much of his base — and the possible good that come from it — is a condonable sentiment. But to in any way cooperate with his unexampled squalor is also a terrifying prospect whose ramifications could forever destroy America's honored political traditions. In the end, I suppose my vote would go to never dealing with the devil.

September 15, 2017

Today, Monday, is the LAST DAY of this brief fundraiser. Please donate now. Your support is very much valued.

***

My next and — hallelujah — final bowel-jiggering surgery will take place in early October, which coincides with the second of my biannual solicitations for reader support. So, since I won't be present for a few days in the first week of next month, I'm choosing to throw caution to my usual tsunami of poor decision-making and stage a four-day finance campaign now.

I appreciate and completely understand that, because of several preceding surgeries, I've been absent now and then throughout the past few months and therefore you might be inclined to pass on contributing this time around. So not to worry. I'll take my blows in the service of gastrointestinal necessities. I prefer pooping over adding to a bank account, the latter of which is rather worthless if one is lethally puffing out, from the bottom up, like a blowfish.

Don't mistake. I'm certainly not encouraging you to pass on clicking the "Donate" button to the right; I very much hope, of course, that donate you will. I also, however, recognize and accept that this autumn's campaign is unique in its complications.

All that said, if you're a regular reader and either enjoy my commentaries or enjoy disagreeing with my commentaries, just click on said "Donate" button and be done with it. Your generosity will be most valued, I assure you.

"We’re working on a plan for DACA," he said while cocking his 9mm Beretta and pointing it at his temple. "The wall will come later," he added, which was followed by a messy kaboom. Eyewitness accounts say that just before pulling the trigger he muttered something about not "los[ing] any voters" as a result of his politically suicidal act. Political gravity, however, soon dropped him like a sack of pecksniffian shit.

I now love Mr. Trump, for he knows not what he does — never has, never will, and now his base knows that. Not all of them, of course, but more each day.

The chief propaganda arm of the Trump administration, Breitbart.com, is furious with its erstwhile pawn — which is the same as saying that Steve Bannon is furious. I never bought into the White House strategist's post-firing media hype about his crusading for Trump evermore, because Bannon is much smarter than the Donald and he could see, all along, that his weak-minded boss lay at the mercy of wicked globalists and malevolent deep-staters.

Bannon's fury at Trump's DACA betrayal, via Breitbart "reporter" John Binder, was swift and unequivocal: "In a meeting with establishment politicians from the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Blue Dog Coalition, President Trump signaled a full-fledged cave on the issue of giving amnesty to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens…. Immigration patriots … recently told Breitbart News that any immigration deal on DACA that includes amnesty would be an 'outrageous selling out of the [Trump] base.'"

Other former Trump-chumps similarly chimed in. "At this point, who doesn’t want Trump impeached?” said the chronically rabid Ann Coulter. Radio jockey Laura Ingraham predicted that Trump is "going to get creamed for this." Rush Limbaugh asked, "Does Trump not know how he would blow up the entire support base he has by making a deal with Chuck and Nancy?" Sean Hannity bordered on despair: It'll all be "over" for Trump if he caves to the Dems, he said. And from Iowa's Bedlam for the politically bughouse, Rep. Steve King prophesied (in a rare moment of partial lucidity) that the Trumpian base is "blown up, destroyed, irreparable." That's a trifle over the top; nonetheless King has gotten a whiff of Trump's malodorous sack of pecksniffianism.

So now I love him, too, as well as Coulter and Ingraham and Limbaugh and Hannity — all of them marinating in the stench of Trumpian betrayal. Join the sizable and still-growing club, suckers. Has the Donald ever engaged a partner whom he didn't ultimately cuckold?

Which brings us to the sage words of Democratic congressman Luis Gutiérrez, who said of Trump's latest partners: "I hope and pray that Pelosi and Schumer are more sophisticated and smarter than everyone else that’s been duped by Donald Trump."

September 14, 2017

Unlike true Twitter compulsives, I follow only 75 tweeters, from Robert Reich to Charlie Sykes, Norm Ornstein to Stuart Stevens, E.J. Dionne to David Frum. I enjoy philosophical eclecticism. My following (376) is minuscule compared to the aforementioned compulsives; I've seen some who possess, say, 20,000 followers, but they themselves follow about 20,000. I gather there exists a tit-for-tat etiquette in the Twittersphere. At any rate, every Twitter-tweeter I follow adheres to behavioral decency — even, usually, Sean Hannity, whom I follow only for the sheer pleasure of reading his Pol Pot-like propagandistic droolings. He is an unintentional joy.

There is, however, one tweeter I follow who regularly violates every minimum standard of basic human decency: remote Trump adviser and tattooed Nixon fanatic Roger Stone (who himself, astoundingly, has 265,000 followers). My online tailing of this odd little man worries me. He represents all the vileness for which Twitter became popular — in fact, the very vileness which I mostly avoided when Twitter became a communications phenomenon. I seem to derive some sort of sick delight from his over-the-top psychoses, which center, enigmatically, on Hillary Clinton. A sampling, from merely the last 24 hours:

Why do I do this? — follow Stone, I mean. Why do I not unfollow this useless, hateful twit of a probable misogynistic core? My one "follow" among his 265k only further encourages the manifestly deranged Roger S. to spew more steaming buckets of bile — similar to those deployed, for instance, against the equally useless, hateful Donald Trump, whom Stone naturally adores.

I suppose my indefatigable following of Mr. Stone troubles me most because of something I heard, as a child, from Bill Buckley (on "Firing Line"). It profoundly influenced my thinking ever since. He and a guest were addressing the issue of free speech and its abuse by contemptible rotters (such as Stone), when he up and observed that we should never censor the genuinely vile; we should, rather, simply ostracize them. (I should stress that I was quite young when I heard this, hence the novel profundity of its reception on my part.) I found Buckley's opinion intellectually sophisticated and deeply persuasive, thus I have tried to dismiss the wretched Stones of this world with a sort of cheerful blitheness. In short, screw 'em; let them descend into their own little hells, with whatever impunity they seek.

Here, though, is my larger self-troubling. My deliberate following of Mr. Stone is an exception to my Buckleyesque code of conduct, as noted in this post's second paragraph. But Stone is a nobody. So what, really, if I derive a bit of pleasure, now and then, from viewing his slime? Donald Trump, on the other hand — commonly mischaracterized as a U.S. president — gushes more substantive hatefulness in one day than Roger Stone does in a year. I then return it, pretty much daily, in kind — which, I inescapably reckon, makes me part of our vastly problematic political culture of hate.

And yet how else does one cope with — or address — such a miserable, loathsome little man as Trump? I feel trapped in the contemporary right's self-made hell of rhetorical ugliness; I often feel as intolerantly vile as a Roger Stone. I'd prefer to write abut politics as the contentious yet noble, policy-centered profession it once was. Instead, the dirt flies and the venom flows.

My one hope, which is far from unrealistic: Robert Mueller will soon resolve much of my quandary.

September 13, 2017

I don't mean to be cynical, I don't mean to be a defeatist. I'm a devout Rooseveltian whose New Deal reformism reflects every philosophical fiber of my politics. The corollary, then, is that my progressivism is colored by political realism, as was FDR's. And so I remark, regrettably but not cynically, that Bernie is at it again — proposing sensible, humane legislation without so much as even sketching a path to its congressional passage.

"Now is the time for Congress to stand with the American people and take on the special interests that dominate health care in the United States," writes Sen. Sanders in a NY Times op-ed. "Now is the time to expand and improve Medicare to cover all Americans," he continues, while conceding "there will be huge opposition to this legislation from the powerful special interests that profit from the current wasteful system. The insurance companies, the drug companies and Wall Street will undoubtedly devote a lot of money to lobbying, campaign contributions and television ads to defeat this proposal."

Indeed they will. Harry and Louise will have spawned dozens of well-financed, anti-reform Beelzebubs by then. Offsetting and possibly outweighing such "huge opposition," however, is that "guaranteeing health care as a right is important to the American people not just from a moral and financial perspective; it also happens to be what the majority of the American people want," observes Sanders. "According to an April poll by The Economist/YouGov, 60 percent of the American people want to 'expand Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.'"

True. But that's before special interests and the ultra-right mean machine deploy their considerable weaponry. What's more, as Joshua Holland of The Nation wrote in early August: "Don’t be lulled into complacency by polls purporting to show that single payer is popular — forcing people to move into a new system is all but guaranteed to result in tons of resistance." Resistance, that is, from populists who now support single payer. Holland itemizes the complications inherent in any Sanders-like proposal, not the least of which is that "we would be forcing over 70 percent of the adult population — including tens of millions of people who have decent coverage from their employer or their union, or the Veteran’s Administration, or the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program — to give up their current insurance for Medicare. Many employer-provided policies cover more than Medicare does, so a lot of people would objectively lose out in the deal."

Adds Holland: "Compelling the entire population to move into Medicare, especially over a relatively short period of time, would invite a massive backlash…. '[L]oss aversion'] is probably the central force in health-care politics. That’s the well-established tendency of people to value something they have far more than they might value whatever they might gain if they give it up."

The politics of Sanders's proposal are brutal, though the brutality comes from more than the right. Blares a Bloomberg headline: "Conservative Democrat [Joe Manchin] Open to Single-Payer Health System." But it's almost comically downhill from there. "[Single-payer] should be explored," said Manchin at first. Then came the story's closing: "Manchin later issued a statement saying he’s 'skeptical that single-payer is the right solution.'" And from The Hill: "Democratic support for a single-payer health-care system has grown by bounds this year, attracting more lawmaker endorsements than any time in the past. But one group is conspicuously not on board: party leaders [Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi]."

As is Sanders's wont, the realities of humane health-care reform remain a kind of unmentionable. He acknowledges immense pushback from all manner of evil forces, and yet he critically omits the laying out of any strategy to overcome said pushback (as well as overcoming objections from millions of Americans with better-than-Medicare coverage).

Sandersesque idealism has its place, although in this case I fail to see how unfettered idealism is useful. Perhaps more helpful would be a progressive re-push for a public option. As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has noted: "I don’t think you can get [to universal single-payer] overnight. I think you have to talk about doing it piecemeal, step-by-step" — and those steps will take longer than Sanders's four, outlined years.

Which was Obama's insight as well, and which FDR would have lauded — because both presidents were realistic enough to be conservatively progressive.

When one has been regularly dosed with opium and repeated, enema-like purgations of what's left of one's bowels (including, within the last 24 hours, a two-hour, rushed flushing at the hospital), this, from the hyperborean Garrison Keillor, is the last bit of history one wishes to read.

The horse-faced William Henry Harrison lasted only a month in the White House…. [He had] composed a massive speech for his inauguration and stood and delivered it for two hours in a cold rain, a 68-year-old man, hatless, coatless, and then attended three inaugural balls. His wife had stayed home sick and wasn’t there to advise him. A couple weeks later, feeling very ill, he took to his bed. Pneumonia was the diagnosis, though it’s now believed he had a bacterial infection from drinking bad water, there being no sewers in Washington at the time. His doctor dosed him with opium and repeated enemas, and the treatment likely hastened his end.

(My rather amused emphasis.)

The upside of my Harrisonesque treatment is that — praise Jesus — the opium has been discontinued, and a substitute narcotic begun. My Monday absence from this site? Commencing at 2:30 a.m., I began pacing the streets because of the unholy mother of all anxiety attacks — an unprovable but quite possible side effect of opium, which had been prescribed to slow bowel production. No less than 10 miles I racked up, hoofing it. I could neither sit nor lie down; I either kept moving like a shark or I'd surely die — which was of course preposterous, but that's what my befuddled, anxiety-ridden brain was telling me. Virtually nonstop I wandered the sleepy byways of rural America from Monday's wee hours till 10 p.m. Such was the genesis of my week, whose effects mildly spilled into yesterday. Hence my two-day absence, for which I apologize.

But, as the pixilated John Astin used to say on "Night Court," I'm feeling much better now. I do sometimes wonder, though, if W.H. Harrison said the same on April Fool's Day, 1841.

September 11, 2017

I'm having some medical issues that need attention today. I hope to be back tomorrow.

***

… or Wednesday, perhaps. Today (Tuesday) I have medical appointments and I'm still recovering from yesterday, whose agonies were only slightly less than those of listening to a full Donald Trump speech.

September 10, 2017

The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations.

Those are the incisive words of a prominent Democratic politician, who further notes that his party's essential conservatism — again, through "the strong alchemy of time" — evolved from the militant, 1930s thrust of New Deal dissent. To this politician's observation, an eminent political historian adds:

The new dissent [from the right] … is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published … years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the [past]. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways.

Forgive me, gentle reader, for I have punked you (via the above use of the present tense). The prominent Democratic politician was Adlai Stevenson, speaking in 1952, and the quoted political historian was Richard Hofstadter, who expanded on Adorno's writings in his mid-1950s essay, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt." As much a commentator on his era's cultural scene as a historian of American politics, Hofstadter's brilliance foresaw the perils of a restless, right-wing personality of dissent that bore no kinship with authentic conservatism.

[T]he pseudo-conservative political style, while it may already have passed the peak of its influence, is one of the long waves of twentieth-century American history and not a momentary mood. I do not share the widespread foreboding among liberals that this form of dissent will grow until it overwhelms our liberties altogether and plunges us into a totalitarian nightmare. Indeed, the idea that it is purely and simply fascist or totalitarian, as we have known these things in recent European history, is to my mind a false conception, based upon the failure to read American developments in terms of our peculiar American constellation of political realities…. However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

I have long since borrowed from Hofstadter — and Stevenson — in my repeated emphases that what routinely passes for American conservatism is in fact a scandalous corruption of both word and concept. As a democratic socialist I nonetheless sympathize with Burkean conservatism's most fundamental precepts — namely, a respect for society's institutions and traditions (on which a dependable culture is sustained), albeit mitigated by incremental change; thus I harbor no socialist hostility to genuine conservatism (which, once again, is generally characterized as Burkean). A reflexive animosity to even conceptual conservatism is a lazy, liberal-progressive impulse.

Politically — which is to say, electorally — this impulse is also self-defeating. More Americans see themselves as conservative than liberal (and vastly more Americans see themselves as either conservative or moderate than liberal). And yet liberals and progressives are forever denouncing conservatism, which effectively translates into their alienation of self-identifying conservatives (an electoral plurality) as well as a denunciation of themselves — that is, a denunciation of modern liberalism, as astutely defined by Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and which still holds today. What the denouncers should be rebuking is pseudo-conservatism, as Hofstadter so accurately defined it. Contemporary Republicanism and especially Trumpism are no more "conservative" than is Elizabeth Warren.

The reddest of states and most anti-intellectual crimson districts are, of course, impervious to what I'll still customarily call "liberal" outreach. Purple regions, however, are ripe for a liberal reeducation; that is, for Democrats to reclaim the Stevensonian insight of contemporary liberalism as authentic, Burkean conservatism. Democratic pols and progressive activists who canvass swing districts with an outspoken hostility to conservatism are merely and senselessly disaffecting voters who have yet to learn that their more traditional conservatism is not Republicanism; indeed the latter is real conservatism's greatest enemy, what with its hostility to American institutions and political traditions.

The classic Hofstadterian usage of "pseudo-conservatism" could be usefully deployed by Dems, liberals and progressives as a separating wedge between traditionally conservative Americans and the Republican Party. Simply put, most actual conservatives don't know any better. They believe their conservatism is Republican conservatism because Republican pols tell them it is — because Republican pols since McCarthy and Goldwater have shrewdly coopted the term "conservatism," because Republican pols know a plurality of American voters see themselves as conservative.

Democrats & Friends should set these Americans straight. They should, wherever geographically appropriate, identify as America's "truly conservative party," as Adlai Stevenson observed 65 years ago — as "the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations."